National Writing Project Day #2 & Photo Editing with Pixlr

Day #2 of my National Writing Project experience is now past me and we had another great day!  I am coming away with so many awesome ideas for teaching writing.  I hope that if you get the opportunity to experience the NWP at a site near you next summer, you jump at the chance!  You won't be sorry!

Today's lesson that I would like to share is called "Roll the Dice" poetry, compliments of one of our facilitators, Amy Harter.  Amy is a high school teacher from Milwaukee and has been participating in the Writing Project since she went through the program in 2010.  She is one of the most creative and energetic educators I know!  I encourage you to visit her blog at www.universeastext.com to read more about her great ideas!

Begin by assigning different topics to each student.  They can be very random or specific to something you are studying -- multiplication, ecosystems, the American Revolution, a human body system, etc.  Some of the random topics from today included soap, happiness, quilts, and weddings so you can see that you can use just about anything for a topic.

You take two 10-sided dice (if you don't happen to have any handy, you can use virtual dice at Roll Dice Online or on many SMART Board document software.)  Students will roll the dice a total of 6 times.  The first time they roll, they add the amounts on the two dice together and that equals the number of words in their poem's TITLE. 

The second roll added together equals the number of words in the first LINE of the poem, the third roll added together equals the second LINE, and so on. 

There will be a total of one title and 5 lines in this poem.

Here's the catch....each line has to be its own sentence.

So here's what I wrote today....The random topic I was assigned was "Favorite T-Shirt."  (Just focus on the bold face words.  The number that is in the parentheses is the sum of the two dice to determine how many words are in each line.)

Title (13 words): 

An Ode to my Favorite T-Shirt, I Will Keep You Forever and Ever

Line 1 (18 words) : 

Summer camp, baseball team, teeny bopper band, the color green, my t-shirts, soft from love, all promote you.

Line 2(9 words):  Though worn and frayed, you’ve grown comfy with age.

Line 3: (7 words):  I wear you now when I sleep.

Line 4: (8 words):  Keeping me company as I count jumping sheep.

Line 5 (10 words):  T-shirt, know my love and respect for you is deep.

It's pretty goofy, I know, but it was a lot of fun to write and extra challenging with limiting myself to using an exact number of words.  I hope you will give it a try!

Today is Tuesday so I'm going to link up with Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried It Tuesday to share a fun photo editing tool I found this week called Pixlr.  (Was I the only one that didn't know about this fun tool???)  Holly's regular weekly Tried It Tuesday returns in August so I'm glad I can share this now.

Pixlr is a free online photo editing tool that is a lot of fun to play around with.  (And I'm sure spare time is something we all have right now, right???) 

You can choose your photos from your computer and play around with the effects.  I had so much fun with this!  Here are a few of the family that I doctored up...

 

Finally, before I go and work on my big project that I have to present at NWP on Friday (I'm researching how to use mentor texts to revise writing), I want to remind you to enter my Rafflecopter drawing to win a $10 Amazon gift card and one of my Writer's Notebook Divider Pages sets from my TpT Store.  The contest ends Wednesday night so enter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Until tomorrow!